In the early years of the 21st Century gvnet.com/streetchildren/Brazil.htm

Federative Republic of Brazil

Characterized
by large and well-developed agricultural, mining, manufacturing, and
service sectors, Brazil's economy outweighs that of all other South
American countries and Brazil is expanding its presence in world markets.

Since
the onset of the global financial crisis in September, Brazil's currency
and its stock market - Bovespa - have significantly lost value, -41% for
Bovespa for the year ending 30 December 2008. Brazil incurred another
current account deficit in 2008, as world demand and prices for commodities
dropped in the second-half of the year.[The World Factbook, U.S.C.I.A.
2009]

CAUTION: The following links
and accompanying text have been culled from the web to illuminate the
situation in Brazil.Some of these
links may lead to websites that present allegations that are unsubstantiated
or even false. No attempt has been made to validate their authenticity
or to verify their content.

VIOLENCE AGAINST CHILDREN - "Nowhere does
the gap separating rhetoric and reality emerge more starkly than in the
contrast between the guarantees afforded children by the 1988 Constitution
and the cold-blooded assassination of boys and girls who live on city
streets. If there is anything that most vividly symbolizes the perversity of
the contemporary wave of violence in Brazil, it is the way it has victimized
children."

There are now seven
million abandoned children living on the streets of Brazilian cities. Crimes
against these children are characterized by extreme brutality and include
torture and dismemberment. Often their bodies are left out on the streets
"to serve as example for others."

Those who manage to
survive another day are left worrying about where their next meal will come
from and finding a safe place to sleep. A social worker has suggested that
these children are subject to a process of "natural selection," in
which only the strong survive to adulthood and the weak die early from
disease and violence.

Street children,
utterly deprived of their most basic needs, often become victims of death
squads or other forms of violence born of their precarious situation. Since
they often resort to theft to survive, some people have paid death squads to
"clean up the streets" and get rid of such an
"inconvenience."

Unfortunately, many
Brazilians believe that the extra-legal killing of street children is a
legitimate measure to combat criminality and violence, because they feel
revolted with the unrealistic legal "solutions" provided by the
state.

After a few minutes
of conversation, he brought me to the bus shelter he and several other street
children called home. They were very anxious that others might discover their
hideout. They said the police might beat them, or worse. At night, they
covered themselves with cardboard and newspapers to stay warm.

The children told
me stories of how they had ended up on the streets. Some had been sent away
when their families' food supplies ran out. Others had fled homes where they
were physically or sexually abused. Each one had a unique, heart-wrenching
story.

Most of these
children had only a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. They were penniless and
malnourished. All were barefoot. Most didn't even know their own ages, but
several must have been as young as 8. Violence and hunger were an everyday
part of their lives.

THE MASSACRE - According to
survivors, the morning of the day before the massacre, a young group of
children threw stones at police cars. Some of policemen allegedly told them,
"don't worry, we will get you soon!" As children from the
Candelária church were usually given warnings such as these by policemen, the
young perpetrators left without worrying too much about the threat.

At midnight, a few
cars came to a halt in front of the Candelária church. Next, gunfire shots
were heard. The children tried to cover up, but eight of them were shot to
death, with several others wounded. One of the children present that night,
Sandro Rosa do Nascimento, would later commit one of Brazil's most infamous
crimes.

The international
community severely condemned the attack, and many in Brazil asked for the
prosecution of those who shot the Candelária church children.

There
are an increasing number of street children videos now available that
constitute a supplementary source of information for researchers, especially
for those who may not have experienced the reality of street children.[Playlist developed by Brian Horne of
almudo.com & streetkidnews.blogsome.com]

The Department of Labor’s 2004 Findings on
the Worst Forms of Child Labor

U.S. Dept of Labor Bureau of International
Labor Affairs, 2005

www.dol.gov/ilab/media/reports/iclp/tda2004/brazil.htm

[accessed 24 January 2011]

INCIDENCE
AND NATURE OF CHILD LABOR - In urban areas, common activities for children
include shining shoes, street peddling, begging, and working in restaurants,
construction, and transportation.Many
children and adolescents are employed as domestic servants, and others work
as trash pickers, drug traffickers, and prostitutes.In 2001, 11.9 percent of working children
ages 5 to 15 years were not attending school.

Human Rights
Reports » 2005 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices

U.S. Dept of State Bureau of Democracy,
Human Rights, and Labor, March 8, 2006

ARBITRARY
AND UNLAWFUL DEPRIVATION OF LIFE - Death squads with links to law
enforcement officials carried out many killings, in some cases with police
participation. The National Human Rights Secretary stated that death squads
operated in 15 states. Credible, locally-based human rights groups reported
the existence of organized death squads linked to police forces that targeted
suspected criminals and persons considered "undesirable"--such as street children--in almost all states
and the Federal District.

CHILDREN – A July study by
the Institute of Applied Economic Policy (IPEA) reported that more than 100
thousand children and adolescents were living in public shelters. The leading
causes for displaced children were: poverty (24 percent), abandonment (19
percent), domestic violence (12 percent), and drug abuse by parents or
guardians (11 percent). The IPEA report also revealed that in more than half
of the cases, children were living in shelters due to the parent's belief
that the child would receive better care there than at home.

In September the
NGO Travessia reported that approximately 350 children lived on Sao Paulo
City streets, and an additional three to four thousand children worked as
street vendors.

The city of Rio de Janeiro
operated 38 shelters and group homes for street children. The Sao Paulo City
government runs several programs for street children, including a number of
shelters for minors and the Sentinel Program, which identifies at-risk youth
and provides social services, counseling, and shelter.

Concluding Observations of the Committee on
the Rights of the Child (CRC) - 2004

[64] The Committee
expresses its grave concern at the significant number of street children and
the vulnerability of these children to extrajudicial killings, various forms
of violence, including torture, sexual abuse and exploitation, and at the
lack of a systematic and comprehensive strategy to address the situation and
protect these children, and the very poor registration of missing children by
the police.

In Brazil, along
with partner organisations, we are working to mitigate the effects of this
insidious trend; reports state that the country is overtaking Thailand as the
most popular destination for child sex tourism. Despite Brazil's growing
economy, street children in cities
like Recife, in the north-east of the country, are turning to prostitution
simply to afford a plate of food.

Life on the street
for these children is grim and often punctuated by violence, drug addiction
and sexual abuse. Many girls fall pregnant by the age of 12. The statistics
are heart-wrenching – UNICEF estimates that there are as many as 250,000
child prostitutes in Brazil.

Brazilian Street Kid Publishes
Inspirational Book with Help from American Professional Athlete

Life on the streets
of Brazil's third largest city is far from easy. Approximately 5 million
people inhabit Belo Horizonte, and the impoverished masses dwell in slums
that line the city's mountainside circumference. These shanty communities are
called "favelas" in Portuguese. Many favela children wind up
working the streets to bring home money to feed their families, and often to
support their parents' addictions. Most of the children who work in the
streets one day choose not to return home at all.

By the time Sidney
was 11 years old, he had been in and out of juvenile institutions. He was a
drug addict, thief and gang member. He had escaped gang warfare, corrupt
police and murderous vigilante squads. He had learned every survival tactic
the streets had to offer -- survival tactics that were slowly killing him.

VIOLENCE AGAINST CHILDREN - "Nowhere does
the gap separating rhetoric and reality emerge more starkly than in the
contrast between the guarantees afforded children by the 1988 Constitution
and the cold-blooded assassination of boys and girls who live on city
streets. If there is anything that most vividly symbolizes the perversity of
the contemporary wave of violence in Brazil, it is the way it has victimized
children."

There are now seven
million abandoned children living on the streets of Brazilian cities. Crimes
against these children are characterized by extreme brutality and include
torture and dismemberment. Often their bodies are left out on the streets
"to serve as example for others."

Those who manage to
survive another day are left worrying about where their next meal will come
from and finding a safe place to sleep. A social worker has suggested that
these children are subject to a process of "natural selection," in
which only the strong survive to adulthood and the weak die early from
disease and violence.

Street children,
utterly deprived of their most basic needs, often become victims of death
squads or other forms of violence born of their precarious situation. Since
they often resort to theft to survive, some people have paid death squads to
"clean up the streets" and get rid of such an
"inconvenience."

Unfortunately, many
Brazilians believe that the extra-legal killing of street children is a legitimate
measure to combat criminality and violence, because they feel revolted with
the unrealistic legal "solutions" provided by the state.

Street Children

Human Rights Watch

At one time this article had been archived and
may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 21 September 2011]

While street
children receive national and international public attention, that attention
has been focused largely on the social, economic and health problems of the
children -- poverty, lack of education, AIDS, prostitution, and substance
abuse. With the exception of the massive killings of street children in Brazil and Colombia, often by police,
which Human Rights Watch reported in 1994, very little attention has been
paid to the constant police violence and abuse from which many children
suffer. This often neglected side of street children's lives has been a focus
of Human Rights Watch's research and action

In several
countries where we have worked, notably Brazil, Bulgaria, and Sudan,
the racial, ethnic, or religious identification of street children plays a
significant role in their treatment. The disturbing notion of
"social-cleansing" is applied to street children even when they are
not distinguished as members of a particular racial, ethnic, or religious
group. Branded as "anti-social," or demonstrating "anti-social
behavior," street children are viewed with suspicion and fear by many
who would simply like to see street children disappear.

Brutal end for woman who devoted life to
helping children from Rio's violent slums

Appalled by reports
of death squads exterminating street children in the beachside city, she set
her sights on the favelas of Rio. Yet this week, after nearly a decade
dedicated to the children of South America, she met the most ghoulish end
imaginable - hacked to death with kitchen knives at her Copacabana home
alongside her husband and another colleague, apparently by one of the street
children she had tried to save.

According to
Bostian, U.S. director of Hope Unlimited, only 18 percent of Brazil's street
children are biological orphans. The vast majority are children who have run
away from home to escape violent or neglectful parents.Once the runaways hit the streets, however,
they find that option isn't much safer -- in fact, for many it is brutal and
deadly. The average lifespan for a Brazilian street child is less than four
years, with most meeting a violent end. In 2006, the United Nations reported
that 16 children are reported murdered every day in Brazil. Many more murders
go unreported.

“The situation with
street kids in Brazil has not gotten a lot of attention,” Bostian said. “Only
18 percent of these kids are biological orphans. The rest are social orphans.
They think they would be better off on their own away from their home. Most
die from violence in the streets.”

Many of the
children suffer from poor health and malnutrition. Because of rape and forced
child prostitution, they are often exposed to HIV/AIDS. According to the
Brazilian Center for Children and Adolescents, Brazil has more than 800,000
child prostitutes. Drugs also run rampant among the children, who sniff glue
to escape reality.

The problem with
street children became so bad in the late 1980s that Brazil had “large-scale,
deliberate, systematic killing of street children by death squads who enjoyed
a high degree of impunity for their actions,” according to the Hope Unlimited
website. “Street execution" was once listed by Amnesty International as
the third leading cause of death for Brazilian children.

After a few minutes
of conversation, he brought me to the bus shelter he and several other street
children called home. They were very anxious that others might discover their
hideout. They said the police might beat them, or worse. At night, they
covered themselves with cardboard and newspapers to stay warm.

The children told
me stories of how they had ended up on the streets. Some had been sent away
when their families' food supplies ran out. Others had fled homes where they
were physically or sexually abused. Each one had a unique, heart-wrenching
story.

Most of these
children had only a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. They were penniless and
malnourished. All were barefoot. Most didn't even know their own ages, but
several must have been as young as 8. Violence and hunger were an everyday
part of their lives.

Yvonne Bezerra de
Mello was changed by witnessing the police massacre of eight street children
in 1993. That’s when she started alternative schools to help educate children
who have been traumatized by life under control of drug lords that rule Rio.

His stepmother beat
him, so Aluizio Pereira fled for the streets.Three years later, the scrawny 13-year-old still sleeps on the
sidewalk along Ipanema Beach, begging for handouts in the shadows of the
luxury hotels that dominate the upscale neighborhood.

But to some,
Aluizio is more than just a reminder of a grim social reality. In this divided
city, he represents a threat to public security and - thanks to former New
York City mayor Rudy Giuliani - the police are working to clear him, and
others like him, off the streets.

"Street Children" In Brazil

T.H.O.M.A.S. (Those on the Margins of a
Society), EDGES Magazine Issue 27, November 2001

[page 189] The largest
category consists of children living in absolute poverty. These children grow
up in an extremely underprivileged social environment. They lack the most
elemental means to meet basic needs and usually receive hardly any or no
parental care, because their mothers (who are often the only parent) are
forced to seek some means of subsistence. In the absence of day-care
facilities, the children, even toddlers, are left on their own. This exposes
them to a high risk of starting an early “career” on the street.

Abused, confused,
lonely and abandoned, children take to the streets to find a safe refuge from
abuse by parents or stepparents. In a life without hope from the moment they
are born, they soon find that they have nowhere to go, no one to turn to and
no life to live.

An estimated 8-10
million children make their living on the streets in Brazil, primarily
because of extreme poverty.The degree
of vigilante violence against these children is extreme, and the behavior of
their vigilante murderers became a solidifying issue and a public relations
cornerstone in the children's movement.

BEATINGS BY GUARDS - We heard reports
of physical abuse by guards in all detention centers we visited. “The guards
are very violent,” said a volunteer with a nongovernmental organization that
works with detained youths.

The accounts of
youths themselves were not the only indication we had of abuse. In some
cases, the youths we interviewed showed us cuts and bruises that were
consistent with their descriptions of beatings. And when Human Rights Watch
talked to a group of parents of detained children, they described seeing
visible signs of abuse while visiting their children. For example, one parent
spoke of a visit to Santo Expedito in May 2003: … The guards had gone in and hit everybody, beat them up. The boys were
bruised, with broken arms, broken legs, covered with blood. I saw this.
Fifteen boys called me over to look inside and see how they were. I saw them
inside a bathroom. They lifted their shirts to show me the injuries.

Street Children in Brazil

The United Methodist Church UMC

gbgm-umc.org/missionstudies/globalhealth-yth/streetchildren.htm

[accessed 8 Aug2013]

FACTS ABOUT POVERTY - Sáo Paulo has
more people than New York City.There
are 17 million kids, ages 10-14.Children decide to live on the street, because home life is not good,
they need to find other ways to get food, or they are orphans. Before
living in the streets, they existed in favellas, the most impoverished of slums,
dug in garbage dumps for food, and encountered family violence because of the
stress of poverty.

Offering an
alternative social network and activities for children to replace their
existing lives on the street or their dependence on drugs or both, while
dealing with any underlying emotional issues, and providing some hope of a
brighter future.

Brazil's Street Children

United Nations Association of Great Britain
and Northern Ireland

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 21 September 2011]

Grupa Ruas e Praças
(GRP) is a civil society organisation founded in the 1987 by a group of
street educators. The organisation now has a team of 12, including
psychologists, art educators, social workers, and people who have lived on
the streets themselves. GRP staff visit each site where children are
regularly found on at least a weekly basis. Once they have gained the
confidence of the children, they invite them to visit a safe farm owned by
GRP where the children can benefit from comfort, peace and regular meals. If
the visit goes well, the children are invited to spend longer at the farm and
become part of a more structured programme before moving on to the next
stage.

Through innovative
fieldwork and ethnographic writing, Hecht lays bare the received truths about
the lives of Brazilian street children. This book changes the terms of the
debate, asking not why there are so many homeless children in Brazil but why
- given the oppressive alternative of home life in the shantytowns - there
are in fact so few. Speaking in recorded sessions that participants called
"radio workshops," street children asked one another questions that
even the most experienced researchers would be unlikely to pose. At the
center of this study are children who play, steal, sleep, dance, and die in the
streets of a Brazilian city. But all around them figure activists,
politicians, researchers, "home" children, and a global crisis of
childhood

Brazil: An
Endangered Generation

Marlinelza B De Oliveira, Women's Feature
Service, Rio de Janeiro

www.wfsnews.org/citylife/inside5.html

[accessed 8 April 2011]

“The so-called
street boy is an island surrounded by omissions on every side. All the basic
public policies have already failed to help him," says Antônio Carlos
Gomes da Costa in his book 'Brazil Urgent Child'.This book was published over a decade ago
but not much has changed since then.

These families
continually break up and regroup in order to meet minimum, short-term needs,
sending a child to live with a relative or neighbor, or seeking work wherever
possible. Gregori terms this constant movement "circulation," and
says that the one constant in these children’s lives is instability.

Street children in Brazil

Spiros Tzelepis of Greece interviewing Yara
Dulce Bandeira de Ataide, author of "Decifra-me ou Devoro-Te", an
oral history of life of street children in Salvador

[Question] Which
are the causes for this phenomenon? What happens with the families of
these children? [Answer] There are multiple causes for this phenomenon.
The severe level of unemployment, the neo-liberal government policies, the
domestic violence, the high levels of illiteracy of population, poverty are
among them. These families generally are misadjusted, with social and
psychiatric problems, such as alcoholism, violence and other mental
disturbances.

THE MASSACRE - According to
survivors, the morning of the day before the massacre, a young group of
children threw stones at police cars. Some of policemen allegedly told them,
"don't worry, we will get you soon!" As children from the
Candelária church were usually given warnings such as these by policemen, the
young perpetrators left without worrying too much about the threat.

At midnight, a few
cars came to a halt in front of the Candelária church. Next, gunfire shots
were heard. The children tried to cover up, but eight of them were shot to
death, with several others wounded. One of the children present that night,
Sandro Rosa do Nascimento, would later commit one of Brazil's most infamous
crimes.

The international
community severely condemned the attack, and many in Brazil asked for the
prosecution of those who shot the Candelária church children.

The
Killings Escalate In Brazil - Street Children: More and More Killed Everyday

Clearly, there is a
perceived benefit to killing destitute children, not only to those who
directly profit from it, i.e., the hit-men. When street children die it also
'benefit' the people who paid the professional killers to clean up the
streets in the first place.

In 1994, 1221
minors were killed in the State of Rio de Janeiro, an average of more then
three kids everyday; 570 died from gunshot wounds, and a total of 344 were
under the age of 11.